To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind. You can even send a 30 second audio question or comment (MP3 format please) if you're so inclined.

Comments

Pages

Julian - I'll definitely be snagging that book. I come from a similar religious background (lifelong Christian, though I've moved through several different denominations before finding one where I feel "at home" and the theology makes sense consistently) but I have more friends who are atheists and agnostics than fellow Christians. As I've moved away from the kind of Christianity I was raised with to the type I currently follow, it's ignited my interest in reading about my faith and how it interacts with other belief systems and topics, so it's always great when someone just unexpectedly drops an interesting recommendation out of the sky podcast on me.

I'm also a little sad you guys stopped that "supporting jerks who make cool stuff" discussion as quickly as you did, because I'd have LOVED to listen to that conversation.

It may be a combination of inventory cost and labor cost. Maybe also mass economics. There's a LOT of people in the Philippines. A given shop will have something like 3 or 4 techs and those guys work nonstop from opening to closing assembling orders. I've seen (and have actually been) customers dropping money for 10, 20, 50 units at a time. Between the high volume, cheap cost of living, and cheap labor, I can clearly see where the profit is coming from.

They also do 1 unit orders, of course, but I get the impression that those form the minority of their market. They just can't afford to skimp on that because many buyers investigate shops by purchasing single units first to see how much support they'll get.